Vital Stats

03 May 2009

Not Yet Over

So I haven't been blogging regularly for the past few days. That is because I am so overwhelmed with school work that I am always finding myself in the midst of business.

Anyway, my Psycholinguistics class was already over: I turned in my essay a few days earlier than the deadline. I also had a lab meeting last Friday, and it turned out that the project that me and another graduate student is working on will be the topic of the lab meeting two weeks from now. So I have to work on that.

The more immediate thing however is my dissertation proposal. I am turning in a first draft tomorrow. I am still unfinished, so what the heck am I doing writing this blog post! Well, I only have the final section unfinished: the introduction, why the study is significant, what the study is about, and the literature review are already done. I just have to outline what the experiments I want to do will be about.

After I finish that, I will have to work on my joint project, since it is an experiment that we are trying to run over the summer. This is an experiment that attempts to unravel the confounds of an experiment that a different group of people from a different university ran. It happens to be about relative clause processing, which is not my area, but the people who ran across it thinks that the results are muddled by temporal interpretation, which is my area. So we are joining forces together and seeing whether there indeed is an effect with respect to the factors that we are including. Hopefully, that can be a poster presentation for a future conference.

Aside from that, I also have another paper to write. This is the paper that I presented last February, and the organizers are doing a proceedings. So I need to write it up, within 12 pages, and submit it for publication. I have until May 15 to do that.

What else? I am looking for a new roommate. My current roommate will move out at the end of the month.

I am also looking for a job. I have a job until December, and obviously, I cannot finish a dissertation within 7 months. I am currently looking for other jobs on-campus that would give me not just a semester, but a full year's support, but if I don't get anything aside from the one I have right now, then I will use the whole remainder of 2009 to scour the world over for temporary jobs, so that I can live. I happened to mention that to my adviser, so he suggested that we have a little talk so I can set up my dissertation in a way that I can do the nitty-gritty stuff while I am still here.

Oh well, that is the reality of the future. The future is mostly a dark unknown blob, and I tend to make my future, not just wait for things to happen.